Metasystems Design Group

Metasystems Design Group, Inc.—MDG—was a computer-conferencing company of Arlington, Virginia, listed in the era’s directories at 2000 North 15th Street, Suite 103, Arlington, VA 22201. It built and ran the systems on which some of the earliest online communities lived, and it created the one that matters to this site: The Meta Network, whose server later carried ARTS WIRE’s pages, and with them the ARTS WIRE edition of Scibe.

MDG was known, as InfoWorld put it in 1991, “for its Caucus conferencing software for PC and minicomputer”—true computer conferencing, with conversations organized by subject, as distinct from the linear traffic of a simple bulletin board. Caucus installations served corporations, universities, and nonprofit and public-sector groups; the same software tradition underlies the conference-and-topic grammar—rooms, hosts, threads—that MDG’s own network used and that online community has kept ever since.

The firm’s president was Frank Burns. He came to conferencing from the United States Army, where—by MDG’s own account in 1983—he had directed the DELTA programme, an interdisciplinary, computer-linked network of more than four hundred researchers and futurists chartered to improve the performance of Army organizations. Howard Rheingold, chronicler of the early online world, described him as “Colonel Burns of the U.S. Army’s delta force”, a partner in the Metasystems Design Group who retired “to become a toolmaker for electronic activists”. The move from a linked network of Army futurists to a public network for civilians is the founding gesture of TMN, and it was deliberate.

On March 28, 1983, MDG announced the opening of The Meta Network. Its press release promised “a new electronic network” offering “state of the art computer-linked communications services to individuals, government agencies, and corporations who are dedicated to the pursuit of excellence”, and Burns stated the ambition in the release: “The Meta Network is to be an information age version of the think tank. We are establishing a network of networks that is focused on the discovery of knowledge rather than just the exchange of information.” The community the release announced has its own entry.

The firm itself is largely gone from the record. What survives of MDG is an address in old directories, trade-press notices of its software, the accounts of the community it launched, and—in this edition’s small corner of the record—the dead ARTS WIRE addresses at its domain, preserved as pointers in lexia 66 and as a note in the colophon. Companies that build the rooms other people remember tend to be remembered the same way: by their addresses.

Sources and further reading